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Comment LC-1209: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Al Gilman <Alfred.S.Gilman@IEEE.org>; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

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This document is trying to be universal in two many dimensions at once. What results is impenetrable access-babble.

Proposed Change:

*executive summary*

break down the cases addressed by assertions (guidelines, success criteria, and testable assertions in test methods) using sub-categories both of content and of presentation.

- content: genre and task

genre: distinguish narratives, grids, mash-ups, etc. (see details for more).

task: navigating passive content, interacting wth atomic controls, interacting with composite widgets, following multi-stage tasks, checkout from a business process, etc.

- presentation: specialization of the delivery context, describably using terms such as in the W3C Delivery Context Overview and the IMS Global Learning Consortium Accessibility Specification terms for user preferences.

*details*

Testable assertions should come in collections of test conditions that have the same content presented in multiple alternate look-and-feel adaptations. Check multiple assertions in each of these renderings. Don't try to make things universal across prsentation and testable at the same time where that is hard. Allow yourself the ability to say "Must A under condition B and must C under condition D, etc."

This is particularly applicable to the suitability of requred text explanations. It is possible by controlling the exposure of the content to the tester through a prescribed dialog to make all necessary judgements determinable by a lay person; not an accessibility-knowledgeable individual. We need to get there or go home.

The second axis of particularization that has been missed and needs to be put to use is the classification of content by task and genre or structural texture. The structure classes:

- bag (collection of random-category items)

- collection (collection of like-category items)

- list (collection of items with an intrinsic semantic order -- alphabetical does not count)

- narrative (stream of text etc. that tells a coherent tale)

- tree (collection of content with embedded smaller, tighter collections)

- grid (two-dimensional array of content fragments)

- graph (collection of articulable objects linked by significant relationships)

.. these are structure classes that apply to regions in the content, and guide the applicability of information requirements -- each of these cases has its own proper short list of what needs to be in the "what user needs to be able to understand -- through user comprehensible media connected by machine-comprehensible associations."

Likewise if we break out tasks such as:

- managing navigation within the page

- managing navigation around the site

- interacting with an atomic control

- interacting with a composite control (HTML forms and Windows Combo Boxes and Dialogs are examples of the latter).

- money-free On Line Transaction Processing -- getting something to happen at or through the server site.

- money-involving OLTP

- security-sensitive OLTP

We will have a much better handle on what the requirements are for the content.; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: [EDITORZ] The collections of test conditions seem to already be covered (ex. 1.1.1 has if, then language in SC and situations in HTM) The tasks described sound quite a bit like the planned application notes. GV:2-13-2007 i sent for clarification on this. Is this a suggestion that we re-organize our guidelines like this? Not sure exactly what your suggested edit is. Can you help? Thanks Gregg ------------------------ Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D. Professor - Depts of Ind. Engr. & BioMed Engr. Director - Trace R & D Center University of Wisconsin-Madison <http://trace.wisc.edu/> FAX 608/262-8848 DSS Player at http://tinyurl.com/dho6b RESPONSE Is this a suggestion that we re-organize our guidelines like this? Yes. Re-organize the _guidance_, not just the layer that are currently called 'guidelines.' It is an organization that spans the advice presently termed 'principles,' 'guidelines,' 'success criteria,' 'techniques,' 'testable assertions.' I think that this idea may be familiar under the name "rules database" Not sure exactly what your suggested edit is. Neither am I, in terms of document text. It's more a change in the logic of how the general and the specific fit together in helping people [access information, and share information so it is accessible]. Can you help? I will try. We could talk, too. ** what squeaks * math model: two features of the present organization conspire to make WCAG 2.0 a blunt instrument as regards telling the people who need to do something what it is they should do. (1) each guideline expresses (makes more concrete) just one principle each success criterion expresses just one guideline each technique expresses just one success criterion each testable assertion expresses just one technique (2) The upper three layers try to be user-ability, content-category, and task-category agnostic/universal. And normative questions -- the hard decisions about how much is enough -- are placed at this level. This means creating one-size-fits-some imperatives that do the best you can do under this straightjacket, but not by any means the best that can be done in many circumstances because _where the actions have to be taken to do something_, not all those aspects are so unclear. The combination of those by-design structural constraints makes it hard to give effective guidance. some examples... * the criticality of [prompting -- that the system response should be predictable by the user] varies by task. Dissemination of emergency alerts is more critical than who some movie star slept with last night. Actions that disclose sensitive information or have monetary consequences are more critical in this regard than general information sharing. Setting success criteria once across an all-users, all-tasks horizon: (1) only fits for the most common criticality, which is pretty low (2) fails to take advantage of information that *is* known at the time [installed applications, web applications, and information-dissemination web content] are created. This is information that the authoring side knows. They can adjust the vigor of their [usability assurance] safety measures to fit the case. They need to know this sliding scale. So for much content, the content author knows the critical tasks to be performed with this content, and the approaches to making it accessible could be machine-filtered based on knowledge about these tasks. This is one aspect of the 'contextual' approach you have been hearing about from the distance learning community. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/w4a-2006/ * let's turn to the educational enterprise. Materials prepared with the express purpose of being learning resources are generally targeted to a grade level. A given finite transition in the skills and knowledge of the learner. This stratification of the corpus of pedagogical content is a positive thing. Keeps learners from being bored by reiteration of what they already know but also from being baffled by too great a density of what they don't. So for the specific genre of textbooks and similar learning resources, the state of practice is that the content is targeted to a group with defined cognitive capabilities. A "one standard fits all cases" in the area of natural-language clarity and simplicity is ill suited to this field of endeavor. And the reading ability expectations of the content are known at authoring time. ** what works - reading-level targeting in educational materials - language-specific simple-language guidelines - a well-balanced content tree in DAISY books - 2D, layout-dependent navigation on the TV ** blue sky There is a database of rules saying what function/performance requirements to apply under defined circumstances. For [all? | the great preponderance of all?] combinations of circumstances, there is a feasible strategy (and function/performance requirement] that affords access. .. but there is no a-priori presumed structure or grouping of the rules. Just a collection of patches of circumstances with strategies and function/performance requirements articulated for that patch in the space of circumstance-discriminants. Drop WCAG 2.0 back to Note and abandon the idea of a Recommendation per this charter. This frees the people who have learned what they know from developing WCAG 2.0 to haggle with a free hand in the TEITAC negotiations, where a more deployable result may emerge. ** baby steps Look at (as circumstance discriminants) -- the kind of content (snapshots, essays, merchandise) -- the tasks offered (buy, offer for auction, read for information, etc.) -- the user abilities (or preferences 'laundering' these) under which the strategy has to afford access. Review techniques and test points to see how much sharper they could be in meting out just expectations if the circumstances were spelled out in this way, particularly where the author reasonably does know things about the circumstances of use. Look at the IMS schemas for content characteristics, and for delivery context characteristics (device + user preferences). ** THE PLAN ? -- (call) Develop a user-experience web so that by searching / querying this web of current experience, authors can make effective decisions as to baseline+techniques that have a high likelihood of delivering the information across the breadth of information consumer diversity. Develop a rule-base of access-prognostics that are continually validated against the experience collected from users. Al I then talked to Al for a couple hours on the phone. In the end I crafted the response below and shared it with him. He agreed to the response. He said although he would like to see it organized in a different way and made into a note etc. - he could live with what we have. Discussed in the 22 February 2007 telecon: Accepted by unanimous consent. http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/02/22-wai-wcag-minutes.html {Partial Accept}; Resolution: Thank you for your comment. Much of what you propose here would require a complete restructuring of the document or changing it into a note. Without a concrete restructuring proposal that shows how this would happen without creating other problems, we are not able to evaluate this clearly. If there are specific changes that you could suggest particularly around your idea of providing additional information on scope or application of success criteria and techniques we would be very happy to consider them as we move forward on evolving the understanding and techniques documents. We will also keep these comments in mind as we are working on these documents and trying to provide such information as we identify it ourselves.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)